This invention relates to a printer which feeds continuous feed paper sheets thought the printer by means of edge strips which are formed on opposite sides of the paper sheets. Such printers range from very expensive, high speed line printers to very inexpensive printers sold primarily for small business and home use. Such printers use paper which is in a continuous length, but with spaced-apart, laterally-extending perforation lines. The paper can be separated into individual sheets when desired by tearing along the perforation line. The paper sheets may be successive pages of documents such as reports or letters, support or carrier sheets for envelopes, adhesive labels or stickers, or successive sheets of invoices, checks, receipts or other documents.
The edge strips are also separable from the paper sheets by means of perforation lines which extend along the length of the paper sheets. The perforation lines define the edge strip and paper sheets on opposite sides thereof. The edge strips have holes which extend along its length at regularly spaced-apart intervals which match the spacing of sprocket teeth on the axially-extending peripheral surface of sprocket wheels which are positioned on opposite sides of the printer at the paper platen.
The edge strips are usually manually torn from the paper sheets after the paper has been removed from the printer. This is a tedious, time consuming job. For this reason, those trimming the edge strips manually tend to try to remove the edge strips from a number of sheets at the same time by fan folding the sheets, if they are not already fan folded. If too many layers are stripped at the same time, the edge strip can fail to separate cleanly, and can either leave a ragged remnant of the edge strip attached to the paper sheet, or can tear into the paper sheet, thereby requiring that sheet to be re-printed.
The invention of this application relates to a edge strip trimmer, and a printer which incorporates a pair of edge strip trimmers positioned on opposite sides of the printer to separate the edge strip from the paper sheet to which it is attached as the paper sheets are fed through the printer.